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The changing face of erotica : a study of erotic literature in the works of Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Erica Jong

Gavera, Lucille (2004-03)

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2004.

Thesis

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: For especially feminist critics, erotic literature depicts an area of human experience dominated by male
principles. Until very recently, the rules of erotica dictated that men mostly produced and consumed it,
and women played the props. Of course this implies that female subjectivity is constructed by the male
gaze, and hence reified and commodified in terms of the male prerogative.
To challenge and overthrow 'male-perspective' erotic language and tradition, it has been argued that we
need a woman's point of view, definition and description of sexual experience. To attack the
phallocentrism of erotica, recent erotic novels have tried to create empowering scenarios for female
sexuality in which the female characters are placed in positions of equal sexual power to the male.
The analyses of the erotic writing of Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Erica Jong in this thesis attempt to
determine whether the texts discussed succeed in incorporating diverse styles and orientations of
depicting the sexual to construct a new language for desire.
During much of his lifetime, Miller's writing was branded obscene, his voice too vulgar and his use of
autobiography too egocentric. But critics also came to see his style and voice as revolutionary, and his use
of the obscene and the irreverent as literary devices to awaken the reader from a wretched sterility of
mind and body.
Many attempts have been made to explain what many critics have come to see as Miller's misogynist and
patriarchal attitudes in his writing. Although Miller inventively portrayed a sense of people and of place,
he seemed less successful at unravelling his attitudes toward sex and women. And so many reviewers do
not see Miller playing an expansive role through his writing of the taboo by freeing us from our sexual
neuroses, but find that the reader is abandoned within the limitation of a sexual mindset that is only
named, not transformed.
The limited insight critics see in Miller's writing of the sexual has been ascribed partly to the fact that the
sexual odyssey in literature has for centuries been a male prerogative in which the female's only role was
to provide material for the fictions the male would create. But as is clear from Nin's and Jong's erotic
writing, more and more female writers have taken on this journey, and have succeeded at least to some
degree in giving their characters the power and freedom to reach a fundamentally female sexual
awareness and position.
Great disagreement exists among critics over the literary value and importance ofNin's writing. Her work
has been rejected as pointless explorations of erotic entanglements in which writing becomes nothing
more than a solipsistic activity. On the other hand, it has been recognised as a new kind of writing of the
female aesthetic which ignited the discourse around the issue of a genre of gender.
Nin's erotica mostly displays a woman's sensibility by using a woman's language and seeing the sexual
experience from a woman's point of view. This implies that Nin treats her female sexual characters as
subject-matter rather than object-matter as is generally the case in erotica from the male point of view. Although opposing viewpoints exist of Nin's contribution to the development of a female voice in
literature, Nin does seem to expand the boundaries imposed on the writing of the sexual woman by
introducing a fluidity in her depiction of gender and of sex - especially through her erotic portrayal of the
lesbian relationship and her candid writing of the ultimate taboo - the sexual relationship with her father.
While Miller's and Nin's lives were unavoidably entwined with their autobiographical writing, Erica
Jong's writing - and by implication her life - was moulded into a media product, and it has become
difficult to approach her work except through complex layers of reputation and stereotype. Although
Jong's Fear of Flying almost immediately topped the best-seller lists upon publication, the sheer scale of
the novel's sales led some critics to think of her work as 'popular culture' rather than 'literature'.
Jong's erotic writing has sparked similar criticisms to those lodged against Nin's, especially those which
question whether Jong ever attempts to defme her women characters away from a (dominant) male sexual
partner. Although Fear of Flying was supposed to be a celebration of female sexual autonomy, feminist
critics were troubled by what they saw as the female protagonist's ultimate affirmation of patriarchal
standards of female conduct.
But despite the varied criticism of Jong's attempt to write an alternative narrative of the female body,
some reviewers do see such a new story in her main female character's physical journey in that it
coincides with the biological rhythms of her 28-day menstrual cycle. Jong is therefore seen to write into
her text much more than a body that seeks and receives sexual gratification to become a body that tells a
tale previously absent from American literature.
Yet the winds of social, political, economic and cultural change where the sexual is concerned have
blown across Miller's, Nin's and Jong's erotic writing, so that the conflicts and challenges that occupied
their sexual writing now seem to strike readers as very much dated. In this regard it is important to note
how an increasingly 'me-orientated' culture and society - endlessly portrayed and exploited by the media
- has forever altered the contemporary view of the sexual. And so the erotic in contemporary society has
become ineluctably connected to the sexual value that the commercial gaze bestows.